Medical Coders Can Take A Cue From David Lee Roth

Your medical coding career can certainly take a cue from this example. In the 1980s, the notorious story of Van Halen took place. The hair band was so high-maintenance that they demanded their dressing room always have a bowl of M&M’s which could never be brown. Van Halen cancelled a show because David Lee Roth found brown M&M’s in his dressing room.

But then Roth isn’t quite the prima donna all thought him to be. The no-brown-M&M’s clause in their contract was actually a matter of life and death. With big crowds, heavy equipment, electricity and other complex hazards, rock shows can be very dangerous if the venue does not set them up correctly. He wrote in his memoir, “When I would walk backstage, if I set my eyes on a brown M&M in that bowl, well, we’d line check the entire production. And you would find a problem for sure.”

Surgeon Atul Gawande points out that in surgery and in many other fields, we know more than ever before. He says, “The reason that our failures remain frequent is increasingly evident: The volume and complexity of what we know has crossed our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely or reliably.”

Gawande argues that under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. So you should be shy about pasting those checklists on your monitor, in the margins of your books or in the ‘personal notes’ section of your billing software. And you shouldn’t be embarrassed about making sure your office follows through.

Medical coding is at least as complicated as surgery or rock-and-roll. And here you’ll need all the help you can get.